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I feel bad for the judge. He's bending over backward to rationalize the end justifying the means... and he's dead wrong. His argument is essentially that if yo

I feel bad for the judge. He's bending over backward to rationalize the end justifying the means... and he's dead wrong. His argument is essentially that if your house is connected to a road, then there is no expectation of privacy. I expect the ruling, or at least that absurd part of it, will be overturned or superseded. But the counter argument (for future cases) would be that running through a physical firewall is not a direct connection to the internet (silly as it is to make the argument).

ikeboy 10y ago
Did you read the ruling? Do you have any specific critiques, and do you think the multiple precedents cited are applied incorrectly? Edit: I've gone through most of the relevant sections. Most of the ruling is reasonable, the section this article and the EFF are complaining about is less supported by precedent. The actual legal argument says that hacking is common enough that people don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy, then there's this paragraph: >Although this Court recently noted in dicta that the possibility of hacking "is not enough to defeat an individual's reasonable expectation of privacy" because it is illegal, see United States v. Darby, No. 2:16-cr-36, ECF No. 31 at 10-11 (E.D. Va. June 3, 2016), this Court stresses that child pornography often resembles an international crime. Similarly, much hacking occurs by foreign nations where the governments condone or participate in hacking. Child pornography is not just a national issue; it is an international issue, and at least a portion of the pornography in this case arrived from foreign sources through the World Wide Web This seems to be the weakest part. It's saying that hacking can't be the basis for a lack of expectation of privacy, but that since some countries allow hacking, it's legal there, and if you're accessing stuff from other countries you no longer have the expectation of privacy.
- kakarot 10y ago
  Solution: Turn all international embassies into ISPs.
- deno 10y ago
  Any web page can include content from any country. Country TLDs don’t correspond in any way to where the content is hosted, and for most people even using DNS-resolved URLs is advanced. However, mostly thanks to IPv4 exhaustion, not even IP blocks correspond to geographical location anymore[1]. And all of this doesn’t matter anyway, because of how packet routing works. No one accessing the Internet can be reasonably expected to have any control over how their packets are routed on the network. You only control the next hop[2]. See for example: http://allthingsd.com/20131120/how-somebody-forced-the-worlds-internet-traffic-through-belarus-and-iceland/ http://allthingsd.com/20131120/how-somebody-forced-the-world... So I would agree to the extent that there can be no expectation of privacy for any unencrypted traffic. However, that’s just one type of hacking – snooping. As for actual hacking – that is someone breaking into your system – this system has to be running on something, some sort of device. This device has to be physically located somewhere. If an Elbonian comes to US and breaks into your house is it okay because in their country there are no lock on the doors, just a lot of mud, so breaking is not a crime? This is the logic here, as I see it. What it ultimately comes down to is the US government wants to have it both ways. They want to be able to extradite people that hack into devices located in the US, but they want you to have no expectation of privacy when they are the ones doing the hacking. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provider-independent_address_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provider-independent_address_s... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hop_(networking) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hop_(networking)
  - ikeboy 10y ago
    >If an Elbonian comes to US and breaks to your house is it okay because in their country there are no lock on the doors, just a lot of mud, so breaking is not a crime? This is the logic here, as I see it. If they came to the US they would be subject to US jurisdiction. Hackers from other countries aren't, at least not always. Edit: I mean prosecution. Jurisdiction applies whenever there are effects in the US, see link below.
    - deno 10y ago
      This is my point though. The US government claims they have jurisdiction when it suits them. Guccifer is still in the news and fresh on everyone’s mind. Personally it never made sense to me how one can be subject to some random foreign country’s law by just using the Internet. But if that’s the doctrine it should at least be applied consistently.
- themartorana 10y ago
  No no no!! The heinousness of the crime does not justify giving up or overriding Constitutional freedoms. Never. Not ever. And if anyone is in place to protect us from that level of overreach, it's a judge. I cannot believe he's pulling a "won't someone think of the children!" in justifying (and creating some janky circular logic) this ruling. The scariest precedent here is the level of crime dictating the flexibility of constitutionality.
  - ikeboy 10y ago
    I think you're misreading it. He's not saying that the heinousness of the crime justifies it, he's saying that by accessing child porn from another country, the defendant opened himself to hacking risk and as such has no reasonable expectation of privacy.
    - slowmovintarget 10y ago
      An unlocked car (which is the closest legal analogy, I think) is a bad fit here. If we're really going to search for analogues let's pick one that really matches what's going on in digital communication: physical communication. Whoever, without authority, opens, or destroys any mail or package of newspapers not directed to him, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both. -- Title 18 § 1703(b) What if the "computer" on the internet is my pacemaker, and it uploads a data stream to servers in, say, Dublin. Does that mean I should not have a reasonable expectation in the U.S. for privacy of that data? That kind of rationale is bad in principle and bad law.
      - ikeboy 10y ago
        If you're uploading information to a third party, you no longer have privacy rights under the third party doctrine. That's very well established precedent. As I said in another comment here, the issue is when it goes beyond such information like IP addresses and goes to actually hacking, which involves running code on the victim's computer.

ikeboy 10y ago

Did you read the ruling? Do you have any specific critiques, and do you think the multiple precedents cited are applied incorrectly? Edit: I've gone through most of the relevant sections. Most of the ruling is reasonable, the section this article and the EFF are complaining about is less supported by precedent. The actual legal argument says that hacking is common enough that people don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy, then there's this paragraph: >Although this Court recently noted in dicta that the possibility of hacking "is not enough to defeat an individual's reasonable expectation of privacy" because it is illegal, see United States v. Darby, No. 2:16-cr-36, ECF No. 31 at 10-11 (E.D. Va. June 3, 2016), this Court stresses that child pornography often resembles an international crime. Similarly, much hacking occurs by foreign nations where the governments condone or participate in hacking. Child pornography is not just a national issue; it is an international issue, and at least a portion of the pornography in this case arrived from foreign sources through the World Wide Web This seems to be the weakest part. It's saying that hacking can't be the basis for a lack of expectation of privacy, but that since some countries allow hacking, it's legal there, and if you're accessing stuff from other countries you no longer have the expectation of privacy.

kakarot 10y ago
Solution: Turn all international embassies into ISPs.
deno 10y ago
Any web page can include content from any country. Country TLDs don’t correspond in any way to where the content is hosted, and for most people even using DNS-resolved URLs is advanced. However, mostly thanks to IPv4 exhaustion, not even IP blocks correspond to geographical location anymore[1]. And all of this doesn’t matter anyway, because of how packet routing works. No one accessing the Internet can be reasonably expected to have any control over how their packets are routed on the network. You only control the next hop[2]. See for example: http://allthingsd.com/20131120/how-somebody-forced-the-worlds-internet-traffic-through-belarus-and-iceland/ http://allthingsd.com/20131120/how-somebody-forced-the-world... So I would agree to the extent that there can be no expectation of privacy for any unencrypted traffic. However, that’s just one type of hacking – snooping. As for actual hacking – that is someone breaking into your system – this system has to be running on something, some sort of device. This device has to be physically located somewhere. If an Elbonian comes to US and breaks into your house is it okay because in their country there are no lock on the doors, just a lot of mud, so breaking is not a crime? This is the logic here, as I see it. What it ultimately comes down to is the US government wants to have it both ways. They want to be able to extradite people that hack into devices located in the US, but they want you to have no expectation of privacy when they are the ones doing the hacking. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provider-independent_address_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provider-independent_address_s... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hop_(networking) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hop_(networking)
- ikeboy 10y ago
  >If an Elbonian comes to US and breaks to your house is it okay because in their country there are no lock on the doors, just a lot of mud, so breaking is not a crime? This is the logic here, as I see it. If they came to the US they would be subject to US jurisdiction. Hackers from other countries aren't, at least not always. Edit: I mean prosecution. Jurisdiction applies whenever there are effects in the US, see link below.
  - deno 10y ago
    This is my point though. The US government claims they have jurisdiction when it suits them. Guccifer is still in the news and fresh on everyone’s mind. Personally it never made sense to me how one can be subject to some random foreign country’s law by just using the Internet. But if that’s the doctrine it should at least be applied consistently.
themartorana 10y ago
No no no!! The heinousness of the crime does not justify giving up or overriding Constitutional freedoms. Never. Not ever. And if anyone is in place to protect us from that level of overreach, it's a judge. I cannot believe he's pulling a "won't someone think of the children!" in justifying (and creating some janky circular logic) this ruling. The scariest precedent here is the level of crime dictating the flexibility of constitutionality.
- ikeboy 10y ago
  I think you're misreading it. He's not saying that the heinousness of the crime justifies it, he's saying that by accessing child porn from another country, the defendant opened himself to hacking risk and as such has no reasonable expectation of privacy.
  - slowmovintarget 10y ago
    An unlocked car (which is the closest legal analogy, I think) is a bad fit here. If we're really going to search for analogues let's pick one that really matches what's going on in digital communication: physical communication. Whoever, without authority, opens, or destroys any mail or package of newspapers not directed to him, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both. -- Title 18 § 1703(b) What if the "computer" on the internet is my pacemaker, and it uploads a data stream to servers in, say, Dublin. Does that mean I should not have a reasonable expectation in the U.S. for privacy of that data? That kind of rationale is bad in principle and bad law.
    - ikeboy 10y ago
      If you're uploading information to a third party, you no longer have privacy rights under the third party doctrine. That's very well established precedent. As I said in another comment here, the issue is when it goes beyond such information like IP addresses and goes to actually hacking, which involves running code on the victim's computer.